Thursday, May 28, 2026
1:39 AM |
Life with Adult ADHD
The funny and often frustrating thing about having adult ADHD — aside from such fun things as executive dysfunction, time blindness, revenge bedtime procrastination, and rejection sensitive dysphoria — is the utter truthfulness of the phrase, “out of sight, out of mind.” Which explains all the open tabs on my browsers, and my meticulously composed calendar and notebook filled with to-do lists, which works better for me than Post-Its.
Still, the unfortunate happens, which I’ve learned to just laugh over. I don’t see you for six months? I’ll forget your name. Your Messenger missive got buried under 20 other messages? Best forgotten. The leftovers in the refrigerator? Does not exist until thrown out a month later, because moldy. The cup of hot cocoa the waiter in the cafe gave to me tonight but was blocked out of sight by my laptop? Invisible until Renz came over and gently nudged it to my line of vision. “Oh, my cocoa!” I responded, and happily finished it.Labels: adhd, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, March 30, 2025
9:00 AM |
Recapping a Life
Lately—for the past few years, to be honest—I have sensed a pattern to my TV watching, and it always goes like this: the first season of a show invariably gets me hooked. Maybe it’s the premise that I find intriguing—a man gets into a game of life and death to win a bonanza; a young man finds he has superpowers, and finds himself fighting his father to save the world; a bunch of rich white folk check into an exotic resort not knowing that death for one of them is part of the immersion. Maybe it’s the crispness of the storytelling [hello, Severance or Game of Thrones or Dark], or the world-building is so intricate [hello, The Lord of the Things: The Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time or Dune: Prophecy], or the intrigue of the format is so addicting [hello, RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Traitors US or Survivor] that there’s no way I cannot make myself watch. Maybe it’s the way the characters feel fresh, as though their existence has been meticulously sketched just for me [hello, Dash and Lily]. I can be enthralled by what I find on Netflix, on Disney+, on HBO Max. And I am also a completist, so I consume every episode with the kind of manic energy that can only come from needing—aching—to know what happens next. I can be obsessed with a TV show.
And then the second season rolls around.
Somewhere in the tangle of new characters, shifting allegiances, and increasingly convoluted plot lines, my ADHD-riddled brain begins to short-circuit. Who is this new character again? Why are they suddenly in Westeros? Was this the guy from three episodes ago or someone entirely new? I watch, but I also… don’t. I invariably forget things. I rewind scenes but still miss crucial details. The sharpness of my understanding blurs into the background noise of a world expanding too fast for my neurons to keep up.
So what do I do?
I read recaps. Religiously. I scroll through Vulture like it’s my salvation. I let YouTube videos made by pop culture aficionados to spoon-feed me the details I failed to retain [hello, New Rockstars!]. “Oh, so that’s why Kendall Roy did that,” I mutter to myself. “Oh, so the goats in Yellowjackets are a metaphor.” I have made my peace with this process. It’s a life.
Maybe it’s not just about TV shows. Maybe it’s about how my brain functions in general. The way I navigate the world, consuming fragments of knowledge in non-linear ways, always needing a narrative scaffolding to piece it all together. It’s like being an architect of my own understanding, building with borrowed bricks. But maybe this tendency to need a secondhand interpretation of things I love isn’t about laziness or even incompetence. Maybe it’s something deeper.
Maybe my adult ADHD is a rebellion against a world that refuses to accommodate minds that think in spirals rather than straight lines? Maybe all this neurodivergence is not a curse but a call—to live a creative life, an expressive one. To reject the dull machinations of an artless existence. To understand the world not through memorized facts and formulas, but through emotion, intuition, and an ability to see beauty where others see only the mundane. The inability to sit still or to execute a task so readily, to follow a linear narrative, to adhere to prescribed norms—I don’t think this is a failing. I think it is a refusal to conform to systems that were never designed for people like us in the first place.
My ADHD says: stop stuffing me with useless information. It says: let me live; let me carve out a life that is rich in meaning, in joy, in discovery; let me exist in a way that is fully, beautifully my own.
And maybe that is why I have always clung to art—to film, to books, to music, to TV shows, even with my kind of attention span—because I also like stories that sprawl beyond the confines of syllabi, that resist easy categorization. And yes, maybe I need a roadmap sometimes—a recap, a review, a trusted voice to remind me where we are in the plot—but does that make the journey any less valuable? Or does it simply make it my own?
Perhaps this is why I find comfort in my kind of creative chaos. I do not need to follow a narrative from point A to point B to understand its value. I do not need a perfectly structured essay to tell me that meaning is there, waiting to be unearthed. I am at home in the whirlwind of half-formed thoughts, unfinished projects, and sudden bursts of inspiration that sometimes fade as quickly as they arrive. And that is okay.
Maybe ADHD isn’t a disorder at all. Maybe it’s just an unwillingness to care for the crumbling order of an information age given to fake news and AI-regurgitated narratives. Maybe it’s a refusal to be herded like cattle, an insistence on taking responsibility for the shape of our own lives. Maybe it’s a radical rejection of limitation, of senseless rules. Maybe it is the quiet revolution of those who refuse to be boxed in. Maybe it’s an embrace of something better, something bigger. Maybe it is a way of being that is fluid, dynamic, deeply personal. Maybe it is a different kind of intelligence that does not bow to the rigidity of the world but instead reshapes the world to fit its own rhythms.
Maybe?
Maybe.
Labels: adhd, life, memory, mental health, pop culture, television
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, March 22, 2025
This always happens to me with subsequent seasons of a TV show I like after the first one gets me hooked [e.g., Game of Thrones, Severance, etc.]. As I watch the rest of the next seasons, my ADHD brain can no longer quite follow the twists and turns, and the myriad new characters. So what do I do? I read recaps of each episode [usually in Vulture] to have them explain to me what exactly is going on. I’ve made my peace with this. It’s a life.Labels: adhd, culture, life, mental health, television
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
11:42 PM |
Naps and Lost Time
I was working for a bit but became sleepy, so I went for a nap late in the afternoon. This turned out to be real sleep, only to be woken up to the sounds of Renz coming in to the apartment. I thought it was morning. I asked, “What time is it?” He says, “Ten o’clock.” I was like: Oh no, I overslept for a meeting. I asked, just to make sure: “It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?” He says: “It’s Tuesday.” And I was like: Oh no, Renz is confused about his days. Then I asked, just to be clear: “Is it morning or evening?” He says: “Evening.” I was like: Oh, thank God, but wasn’t I supposed to only take a nap? The endless battle with sleepiness.Labels: adhd, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
8:35 AM |
Date Blindness
Today, a confessional I’d like to share for National Mental Health Week. You know what I hate the most about ADHD? It’s actually not the executive dysfunction [because I mostly solve that through doubling], it’s the weird mental anomaly we call “date blindness.” I have always had this, but I always thought it was just me being lazy about dates. Like, my ears hear “August,” but my brain makes my hand write down “December.” When I used to make posters for the CAC, I took painstaking care of the playdates I’d put in, recognizing this was always something I’d do, but often I’d still get it wrong and Leo Mamicpic would be the one to gently remind me: “Ian, the show is on February 11. You put in March 24.” Like, that totally happens, all the time. Like I know Silliman was founded in 1901, but I’d still put in “1902.” I really had no idea why and I used to berate myself a lot about it. Until I got diagnosed, and learned about date blindness. Fun, fun, fun! Today is Wednesday, right?Labels: adhd, date blindness, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, November 11, 2024
11:29 AM |
Two Worlds in My Head
My brain off Ritalin and on Ritalin is so different. It’s like living two existences. One is vaguely foggy, but it has always been the existence you know. Your normal. The other is clarity, and it’s like someone putting on glasses for the first time and seeing the world that’s sharp and colorful you had no idea.Labels: adhd, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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